1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure relates to an image-processing apparatus, a date identification apparatus, an image-processing method, and a computer program product.
2. Description of the Related Art
Techniques are disclosed that recognize numerals in an image.
A disclosed technique determines a combination of separated characters using uniformity of the width and height of a rectangle, uniformity of a distance between rectangles, and a grammar dictionary (see JP-A-9-44605).
Another disclosed technique determines a character area using, when two areas are adjacent to each other in a horizontal direction (or a vertical direction), the height (or width) of a circumscribed rectangle in each area and the number of areas present between the two areas (see JP-A-9-305702).
However, the known image analyzing apparatus (e.g., JP-A-9-44605), which extracts a character on the basis of the height or width of the circumscribed rectangle of a character candidate, has difficulty in recognizing numerals efficiently and accurately with a small amount of calculations. Moreover, because of its wide recognition range, the known image analyzing apparatus needs to perform a large amount of calculations, and thus takes a longer processing time and has a large amount of erroneous recognition.